Shutter Island Quotes

Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?

This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.

He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?

How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.

Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.

Everyone sees different things.

I loved this woman the way you love ... well, nothing," he said, a note of suprise in his voice. "You can’t compare that kind of love to anything, can you? It’s its own unique gift.

But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took

If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?

She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade...

Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.

and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could...

She died in a fire. I miss her like you... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.

...someday..., we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

I know you. I've known you my whole life. I've been waiting. Waiting for you to make an appearance. Waiting all these years. I knew you in the womb.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.

How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?

Believe it or not, Marshal, I believe in talk therapy, basic interpersonal skills. I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect and listen to what he's trying to tell you, you just might reach him. (87)

Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.

Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and...

The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn't catch you if you didn't stop running.

You was in all sorts of places, huh?” “Yeah, I was. Saw the world.” “What’d you think of it?” “Different languages, same shit.

You don't have a partner, Marshal, You came here alone.

Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, 'No, no, no. It's okay, it's okay. Sssh.' You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need. - Why is that? - What’s that, Marshal? - The full moon. You think it makes people crazy? - I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out. - How come? - Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right? - Sure. - Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water. - I’ll buy that. - Human brain,- Trey said, - is over fifty percent water. - No kidding? - No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.

I've built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old day back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.

He looked back at the page, got one last glimpse before the match blew itself out. Going to find you today, Andrew. If I don't owe Dolores my life, I owe her that much, at least. Going to find you. Going to kill you dead.

Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.

He used it on the next guard, the one in front of the fence. He disarmed him, a kid, a baby, really, and the guard said, 'You going to kill me?' 'Jesus, kid, no,' Teddy said and snapped the butt of the rifle into the kid's temple.

Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.

Don’t forget—Charlie Chaplin too, my friend.” “I’d do an imitation, but I don’t know what he sounds like.” “Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.

obfuscate.

The foghorn of Boston Light moaned across the harbor, a sound Teddy had heard every night of his childhood in Hull. The loneliest sound he knew. Made you want to hold something, a person, a pillow, yourself.

I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don't kill their husbands with an axe.

Baby, why are you all wet?

There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?

SUN WAS in the room when he woke. He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren’t there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up

A Brief for the Defense Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

He thought: so this is what it feels like to love. No logic to it - he barely knew her. But there it was just the same. He'd just met the woman he'd known, somehow, since before he was born. The measure of every dream he'd never dared indulge.

If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

One that society can't forgive, but I can.

Chuck said, "Fuck if I know." Cawley stepped up beside them. "Quite similar to our clinical conclusion.

But as the years passed, he missed her more not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

You were having nightmares, Marshal. Serious nightmares.” “I’m in a mental institution on an island in a hurricane,” Teddy said. “Touché,” Cawley said.

It's the sea, some men take to it. Some men it takes.

Jesus, Dolores, you've got to get yourself together. You've got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes - okay? - and get your fucking head right." Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He'd closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer. Softer. That would have been nice.

Lui avrebbe voluto chiederle che rumore fa un cuore quando si rompe per la gioia, quando è sufficiente la vista di qualcuno per riempirti come né il cibo, né il sangue, né l'aria potranno mai fare; quando ti senti come se fossi nato per vivere un momento preciso e quel momento, per qualche ragione particolare, era proprio quello.

Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed.

God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you?” “No,” Teddy said, “I don’t.” The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we’ve learned from His example.

An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. “You see that?” “Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ’Wait a second. This isn’t right.’ “’I’m supposed to be over there.’ “’Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.

Yes, yes,” the warden whispered. “’My very chains and I grew friends.

Cawley probably wasn’t used to questions that continued after he’d shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.

I open up—” Cawley again: “Using your keys, correct, Mr. Ganton?” Ganton nodded at Cawley, looked back at his knees. “I use my keys, yeah, ’cause the door’s locked.

But do we lose our past to assure our future?

time is nothing to me but a series of book-marks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me,

for a moment, distant. “It’s what you do,” Teddy said softly. “Sure,” Chuck said eventually, his face still flushed. The dock appeared as

The mind...It's an engine essentially. That's what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it's got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don't even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one...Have you thought about that? It's just like a car. No different. One gear slips, one bolt cracks, and the whole system goes haywire. Can you live knowing that?" He tapped his temple. "That it's all trapped in here and you can't get to it and you don't really control it. But it controls you, doesn't it? And if it decides one day that it doesn't feel like coming to work?" He leaned forward and they could see tendons straining in his neck. "Well, then you're pretty much good and fucked, aren't you?

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it—waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. What

It’s an island, boss. They’ll always find us.” Teddy met Chuck’s eyes and nodded. For the first time since they’d met, he could see fear in Chuck’s eyes, his jaw trying to tighten against it.

You think the whole electrical system is fried?” Chuck said, “Good possibility.” “That would mean fences.” Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. “Stee-rike one!” He turned to Teddy. “That would mean fences, yes.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel’s screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head— don’ttakethosefuckingpills

You told yourself it was okay—because that's what you had to do to cross a body of water—but it wasn't.

He lay on his side, looking out at the sea. So blue at this time of day, so vibrant as the afternoon died around it. He lay there feeling the breeze on his face and the sea spreading out forever under the darkening sky and he felt so small, so utterly human, but it wasn’t a debilitating feeling. It was an oddly proud one. To be a part of this. A speck, yes. But part of it, one with it. Breathing.

I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I’d missed my true career.

Or some guy

Nếu anh không điên nhưng người ta bảo với cả thế giới là anh điên thì mọi nỗ lực phản đối nhằm chứng minh ngược lại sẽ càng giúp củng cố quan điểm của họ.

I'm just bones in a box, Teddy.

How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn't there, the next it was.

She couldn’t adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.

Teddy wished that his mother were still alive so she could teach her grandkids you had to get hard, strong. The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took.

I'd like to be sitting here five years from now, Marshal, and know you're still in the world." Teddy looked down at the hand on his knee. Looked up at Cawley. "I would too," he said softly.

she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it - waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The day dawned blue and blurry. A light frost on the grass, a pale, clear morning. It was the first of November, and the sluagh were gone. The light trickled over the island slowly. It brushed against the ruined church spire and dripped down to the memorial, reaching into the crevices of the names writ therein. It poked through curtains and shutters to creep along countertops and kiss sleeping foreheads. It ran along the high street, knocked on the door, danced over the boats in the harbour, and made a sprint up the hill away from the village. It ricocheted through the fields and through the trees, paused reverently at the standing stones, rocketed up to the ancient cathedral where the seagulls swooped, keening.

But it's a slippery slope. Once you introduce the poison into the well, how do you ever get it out of the water?" "You don't

THE WOMEN FROM THE congregation might appear delicate and ladylike, but on this island strength was a necessity. Most of these women could climb onto a roof before a storm to make certain that the shutters at every window were bolted shut, they could cook over an outdoor fire, kill chickens and wild waterfowl, do what they must should the tolerance of our people fade in yet another country.

wished they’d take over if it meant we’d finally have peace. In huts like this with shutters made of cottonwood and roofs of coco palms and thatch, we feared nothing but the overseers’ whips. Nothing British could be worse.

You was in all sorts of places, huh?” “Yeah, I was. Saw the world.” “What’d you think of it?” “Different languages, same shit.” “Yeah, that’s the truth, huh?

Hier gibt's keine Typen mit Schlafstörungen oder welche, die Angst vor Löchern im Bürgersteig haben. Soweit ich das aus den Akten ersehen konnte, sind die Leute hier, nun ja, richtig plemplem.

shutter

And not the clarity of the insane, but the everyday clarity of an intelligent woman in a less-than-intelligent world. She smiled and gave them each a small, shy wave as she sat.

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken. That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it. Here goes. I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it. That’s better.

È un’isola, capo. Ci troveranno sempre.

Che ci creda oppure no, agente, io credo nella terapia della parola, nelle capacità interpersonali di base. Ho quest’idea rivoluzionaria che se tratti un paziente con rispetto e ascolti quello che cerca di dire, puoi riuscire a raggiungerlo.

-Quanti psichiatri servono per cambiare una lampadina? -Non saprei. Quanti? -Otto. -E perché? -Ah, la smetta di iperanalizzare! Umorismo da strizza cervelli.

LA LEGGE DEL 4 IO SONO 47 LORO ERANO 80 +VOI SIETE 3 NOI SIAMO 4 MA CHI È 67?

-Pazzesco. -A cosa si riferisce? -Al luogo in cui è finita. Secondo la mia opinione. -Be’, certo. Almeno questo credo che possiamo prenderlo come un dato di fatto.

-È successo qualcosa di insolito? -Definisca ‘insolito’. -Mi scusi? -Questo è un istituto psichiatrico, agente Daniels. Per maniaci criminali. Non c’è molto si ‘solito’ nella nostra routine.

Pensai che se Teddy fosse stato lì al mio fianco, anche lui avrebbe visto il ratto. L’avrebbe visto eccome. E vi dirò un’altra cosa. Teddy? Lui avrebbe applaudito.